A few days ago I decided to make a boring day a little more interesting by taking out my original Xbox, that had been stored in a box under my bed for too long after a move...
The last time I really used it was when I was around 10 years old, my English wasn't good enough to understand any dialogue so I'd stick to the multiplayer games with friends or the games that weren't heavy with dialogue. I played games such as Halo 1 & 2, Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey, Fusion Frenzy, Ninja Gaiden (I would like to tell you I was good at this game, but I didn't really get very far...) to mention a few.
My Xbox had been modded at some point, and a great deal of love went into it. It got a bigger harddrive, TSOP flashed, latest version of the EvolutionX Dashboard with some applications and emulators and lots of other bells and whistles. All things I learned as I started reading up and trying to figure out what had been done to it.
To little old me that didn't really mean much, all I knew was that I could backup a game to the Xbox and then turn in the game at a game store and get some money to buy a new game, even though I technically still had the game. Today I obviously regret getting rid of those games, and I'm working on getting them back.
However, the reason I decided to bring out the Xbox in the first place was from watching a Youtube video by ModernVintageGamer. Specifically this one where he talks about writing code for the Xbox and the Homebrew scene.
After seeing this it went on from there and I went to the original Xbox subreddit r/originalxbox, where there's a lot of great material on their Wiki and some very nice and helpful people if you need help with something. The first thing I picked up was that the dashboard was running a FTP server right out of the box, so I downloaded FileZilla and connected to the Xbox.
Once in I decided to change up everything into the way I wanted it to look, so I swapped the EvolutionX dashboard for the UnleashX (because it has more features and better skin support). Changed the skin so it looked like the original Microsoft dashboard on the Xbox. Cleaned up all the naming and backed up all the games I had stored from the discs to my NAS including everything else just in case the hard drive would fail. I also went ahead and added a few applications and emulators to play around with.
Some of the advantages to having a modded Xbox that I learned is no region locking, higher resolutions (European consoles were locked at 480i, now I can go all the way to 1080i with the right video cable), ease of use and ease of mind (I can rip my games and not have to deal with getting off the couch or wearing down the DVD drive or the game discs, just play them from the harddrive) and lastly running unsigned software such as Homebrews, applications etc.
Now that I finally have it the way I want it to be I can focus on the good stuff that I'm about to delve into. Which is making homebrew games for the original Xbox.
In doing my research I came across this website called XBDEV.NET that have tutorials for programming with various Xbox Development Kits, there's tutorials for the official Dev Kit by Microsoft (XDK) but also for an open-source version called OpenXDK. Xbox basically runs on a version of DirectX (hence the name of the console), which works out great for me because I've just finished a 3D graphics course where I learned to program with DirectX11. All I have to do is basically downgrade a few versions… Not quite, but that's what's coming up next for me. I think I'm going to start out with taking some assets from an older 2D game I've made for my first homebrew and go from there.
And a public service announcement for all original Xbox owners, please take the time to check if you have a older version of the Xbox that has a clock capacitor. If you do it is highly recommended that remove this as it will eventually start leaking and potentially brick your Xbox. Here's a link from the Original Xbox Subreddit about it.